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And The Branches Became As Storm Clouds
Artist
Trenton Doyle Hancock
(American, born 1974)
Date2003
MediumMixed media on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 97 3/4 × 105 in. (248.29 × 266.7 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase
Object number2004.4
Status
Not on viewCopyright© Trenton Doyle Hancock
Category
Label TextIn a forest, a mythical battle plays out between a gentle race of furry half-human, half-plant “Mounds” and the evil skeletal “Vegans” that want to destroy them. Sprung from the imagination of Trenton Doyle Hancock, this bizarre narrative and its cast of heroes and villains has driven the imagery of his work since the mid-1990s, inspiring hundreds of drawings, multimedia paintings, site-specific installations, and a ballet.
Hancock’s strange cosmology derives from a combination of fantasy, literature, comic strips, popular culture, art history, and autobiographical experience. Raised in a devout Southern Baptist household, the artist cites the central influence of the Bible on his imaginative landscape. Although his paintings allude to epic themes of life and death and good and evil, their meanings remain ambiguous.
The Modern’s mural-sized multimedia painting And the Branches Became as Storm Clouds, 2003, is a work of dense and meticulous detail. A swarm of Vegans rip apart a Mound, whose massive beehive-like body is composed of strips of black and white faux fur. Bubblegum-pink spurts emanate from the wounded form. Pink carries connotations of flesh as well as childlike innocence, while the combination of black and white signifies the visual language of comic books and conjures racial associations. The artist’s fantastical subject matter and draftsmanship draws from art-historical sources, including the grotesque creatures of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516), the Surreal visions of Max Ernst (1891–1976), and the satirical graphic styles of Philip Guston and the cartoonist R. Crumb (b. 1943). The influence of the dark, dreamlike illustrations of the “outsider” artist Henry Darger (1892–1973) are especially evident in the Museum’s painting. For Hancock, like his predecessors, art is a powerful mode of storytelling.
Hancock’s strange cosmology derives from a combination of fantasy, literature, comic strips, popular culture, art history, and autobiographical experience. Raised in a devout Southern Baptist household, the artist cites the central influence of the Bible on his imaginative landscape. Although his paintings allude to epic themes of life and death and good and evil, their meanings remain ambiguous.
The Modern’s mural-sized multimedia painting And the Branches Became as Storm Clouds, 2003, is a work of dense and meticulous detail. A swarm of Vegans rip apart a Mound, whose massive beehive-like body is composed of strips of black and white faux fur. Bubblegum-pink spurts emanate from the wounded form. Pink carries connotations of flesh as well as childlike innocence, while the combination of black and white signifies the visual language of comic books and conjures racial associations. The artist’s fantastical subject matter and draftsmanship draws from art-historical sources, including the grotesque creatures of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516), the Surreal visions of Max Ernst (1891–1976), and the satirical graphic styles of Philip Guston and the cartoonist R. Crumb (b. 1943). The influence of the dark, dreamlike illustrations of the “outsider” artist Henry Darger (1892–1973) are especially evident in the Museum’s painting. For Hancock, like his predecessors, art is a powerful mode of storytelling.